


idylls of the queen; or, how the round table was reformed

by betony



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Female Friendship, Gen, Post-Finale, Spoilers for 5x13
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 13:05:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betony/pseuds/betony
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Guinevere--and Camelot--live on, with help. Always with help.<br/>(Alternatively, the one where obscure Arthurian women take over what's left of Camelot.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	idylls of the queen; or, how the round table was reformed

**Author's Note:**

> This is about half a reaction to that series finale--not to mention the grim fates it gave pretty much everyone--and half the sort of vaguely cracky future in which all the Arthurian women take center stage, which is to say, I apologize in advance.  
> Constructive criticism welcomed, as always.  
> Edit: podfic now available, read by Chestnut_filly; please see link below!

The King is dead. The Queen rules alone. Camelot is weaker than ever before. 

Gwen sits stiffly on her lonely throne and can’t quite bring herself to care. 

* * *

They don’t arrive all at once, which is a blessing. 

Mithian is the first. This is perfectly understandable. Mithian and her kingdom both owe Camelot a debt of gratitude after Camelot—after _Arthur_ saved their king. So it is perfectly understandable that she is here. 

“Oh, Gwen,” breathes Mithian as she swings off her horse. She rushes to Gwen’s side to embrace her, and that makes sense, too, because she and Gwen are friends, and that is what friends do. Once, before her world collapsed into herself, Gwen used to rush to people’s side to embrace them, too; but now she has to remind herself to put her arms around Mithian in return. All Gwen can feel is a certain sort of gratefulness that it is Mithian who has come first. She remembers the way Mithian looked at Arthur: she admired, if not-quite-loved him. That means she comes closest to understanding. 

“Oh, Gwen,” Mithian says again, and holds her closer. 

* * *

Elena is second. 

Gwen is not present when Elena enters Camelot; instead, she holds a meeting with the treasury while Mithian tends to the new guest. Gwen likes holding meetings these days. Even before—everything, even before then, she had reveled in how refreshingly straightforward paperwork was. All a report on the harvests for Camelot’s farmlands wanted was for one to read it. It had no opinion on whether or not one was nobly born. It did not bother to tiptoe around a grieving queen. 

But Elena, even so many years after, is like the north wind. One can only avoid her for so long, and so, Gwen is not entirely surprised when she bursts into the throne room a mere hour later. 

“Guinevere! I’m sorry it took me so long, Father was being silly and and Miles wouldn’t hear of me traveling in this weather, but I told them they were just being ridiculous, and look, here I am—see!” 

She crosses the room in just a few long strides; and Gwen, studying the undiluted enthusiasm on Elena’s face, feels her lips twitch in what might have almost been a smile. 

* * *

Vivian surprises them all. 

There is no one to greet her, therefore, no one to find a groom to tend to her horse and no one but a silent servant to lead her to where the queen sits at dinner with her friends. 

Gwen looks up at the newcomer’s haughty expression and fights the urge—irrational but irresistable, even now—to cower. Servants’ instincts do not die easily. 

Vivian pauses a full moment to look down her nose at them. All she offers by way of explaining her presence is: “The spell broke, when he fell.” 

_Oh_ , Gwen thinks. _Oh_. There was something they had never considered at all, poor Vivian trapped for years in her own mind’s pretense of love for Arthur while they had all laughed off the fiasco. How careless they’d been, about so many things; would it have changed anything if they hadn’t? Does it even matter? 

No. All that matters now is making amends. 

“Forgive me,” says Gwen, sincerely but not humbly. “I never thought about what it must have been like for you.” 

“Clearly,” snaps Vivian, but her expression softens. “But I am sorry, Guinevere, for your loss.” 

She is more gracious than Gwen; Gwen, having undergone love-magic herself (and oh, how hearing Morgana gloat over that stung, even through the hazy film of Gwen’s mandrake-bespelled memories) would not have been nearly so generous. 

“Thank you,” says Gwen. “Will you sit?” 

The tension in Vivian’s shoulders relaxes. “Yes,” she says. “Yes, I think I shall.” 

* * *

Nell simply melts out of the forest. 

No one is sure where she came from, and she doesn’t care to elaborate. Instead they find her one morning on the castle steps, a toddler clutched to her side. Gwen, who had woken up early in hopes of taking a private ride to clear her mind, is the first one to see her. 

“My name is Nell,” she says politely when asked who she is, “and I was hoping to see Sir Gwaine.” 

_Gwaine_. Another crack in her heart. “I—I’m sorry, my lady,” Gwen begins, wishing desperately that there was someone—anyone else to deliver this news. “Sir Gwaine is….is dead.” 

Nell closes her eyes, but when she opens them her face is expressionless. “I thought it might be so,” she says, and oh, how the shakiness of her voice betrays her, “but I had hoped, and—and I thought Gwaine might have wanted to know of his son.” 

His son. Gwen darts a surprised look at the small boy at Nell’s side once again, and that is Gwaine’s hair, and Gwaine’s nose, and perhaps even the beginnings of Gwaine’s chin. _His son_. Nell had loved and lost Gwaine, just as she had Arthur, but Nell has a son to remember him by, and she—Gwen—has nothing except a heavy golden ring and an uncomfortable chair. 

Gwen stumbles to the ground and, all thoughts of dignity lost, howls. 

* * *

When she calms down enough to pay attention to her surroundings, Gwen finds herself in the kitchens. She is sitting on one of the stools by the fireplace. When she was a child, and had first come to serve the Lady Morgana, the head cooks had let her sit there on cold nights, at least until she had warmed up enough to race home. None of those cooks—or any cooks at all, for that matter—are in the kitchen now. Instead, Mithian is crouched to one side, patting her shoulder and making soothing noises, and on her other side, Vivian is making pained faces. 

At least something makes sense in the world. 

“Let her weep,” Vivian is saying, in as disagreeable a voice as ever, and Gwen remembers Arthur saying _Good luck with that one_ and nearly starts to sob again. “It’s not as if she’ll stop because of anything you do.” 

“Oh, do be quiet, Vivian. Let her grieve, for once,” Mithian snaps and turns to Gwen once more. “There, there. It’s all right.” 

“Thank you,” says Gwen, mortified. “Er—why am I here?” 

Mithian opens her mouth but it’s Vivian who speaks first. “Because a few minutes more and we’d have half the court outside to gawk at their queen. Hiding you away in the kitchens was doing our part in upholding the dignity of fair Camelot.” 

“Oh. Thank you again. I’m—I’m better now.” 

“About time,” Vivian replies sourly. “My ears were about to bleed. Not to mention Elena took it into her head to go and find some mead for you, and Lord knows it’s far more likely she tripped down the cellar stairs first.” 

“I heard that!” Elena’s indignant voice echoes from the cellars. “I am not that clumsy!” 

Gwen scrubs at her face and stands up to look around. Just as she suspected, Nell and her son are standing awkwardly in the corner of the room closest to the door. If she is honest, there is a part of her that never wants to see them again, a constant reminder of what she’ll never have, but-- They are the closest thing to family Gwaine ever could have had, and if nothing else, she owes him enough to take care of them. 

“I apologize for my poor welcome,” says Gwen. “Camelot greets you. I do hope you’ll stay.” 

* * *

It doesn’t become clear what she’s done until the first great feast after Nell and her son Guinglain arrive—after it is nearly impossible to imagine Camelot without Guinglain’s antics and Nell’s practicality. By then, Gwen depends on Mithian’s steadiness and Elena’s ebulliance and even Vivian’s asperity to get her through the day, along with Leon and Percival’s unfading loyalty and Gaius’s wisdom. 

She asks them one morning when they mean to leave, and Mithian looks up from planning the menu for the night’s banquet to say, “Not any time soon, I should think. My father knows I’m in service to the High Queen, and so do those of the others.” 

“The High Queen?” Gwen repeats, confused despite herself. 

“The High Queen of Albion, of course,” chirps Elena. “You, silly. Everyone knows Gawant is allied with Camelot, not to mention Nemeth and Caerleon and the Five Kingdoms, too. But the long and short of it is, you have to admit Camelot has enough power to rule above all.” 

“Yes, I know, but I hardly want—“ 

“Albion has a destiny,” Nell says, Guingalain dozing in her lap. “You won’t be the one to hold it back, Guinevere of Camelot.” 

Gwen subsides but can’t help asking, “But what can I do alone?” 

“Don’t be ridiculous.” Vivian punctuates her comment with an expressive roll of her eyes. “What are we, chopped liver?” 

So that settles that. 

There are still empty spaces in her heart belonging to Arthur and Merlin and Tom and Elyan and Lancelot and even Morgana, and more unoccupied seats at the Round Table than she can bear, but Gwen goes on, because she must. She does not weep again, in public or alone. 

But then the feast occurs, and the green knight rides in on his moss-colored horse, and Nell, of all people, accepts his challenge, Gwen’s commands to think of Guinglain ignored. 

It is rather like a nightmare: Nell hefting the axe carefully, considering, and Gwen, wanting to scream but not quite managing it. Of course she doesn’t. She’s never been able to find her voice, not when it really matters. 

“Quickly, my lady,” says the green knight from where he is stretched out on the floor, with just a touch of impatience. 

Nell raises the axe up over her head, swings it down all of a sudden—only to let it land, with a solid thunk, in the floor a good six inches away from the knight’s bowed head. 

“There,” she says, panting, “and if you wish, I’ll be happy to let you do the same to me, one winter hence.” 

The green knight awkwardly rearranges himself so that he is kneeling at Nell’s feet. He studies her face for a moment and then begins to laugh up at her. “My Lady Ragnelle,” he breathes, utterly enraptured, “I might have known your magic, of all people’s, would be strong enough to break my spell.” 

Well. That is unexpected. 

“My name _is_ Ragnelle,” Nell says hours later, before the judgment of Camelot, “and I am a sorceress. I don’t deny that. But you must believe that I meant neither Camelot nor you any harm. All I wanted was to give my son his birthright.” 

Around Gwen, her court is divided. 

“Think of her son,” Mithian mutters. 

Leon glares daggers at Nell; Percival, beside him, looks undecided. 

Gaius says, quietly, (and after all the trials for use of magic he’s witnessed, this must be just one more to him) what they are all thinking: “King Uther would have sentenced her to death.” 

“You can’t be serious,” Elena cries out. 

Vivian snorts. “I know I’d rest easier with one less manipulator in the world.” 

Gwen says nothing, only looks down at the Royal Seal Arthur bequeathed her. It’s not at all like her wedding ring; that he gave her out of love and nothing else. This ring represents his trust that she would do what was best for Camelot. It’s about time she did. It’s about time she found her voice and didn’t let it go once the crisis was done. 

“My father-in-law was opposed to magic,” she says, “and so too was my husband. But through the years it’s become clear to me that their qualms had their roots in fear and ignorance rather than truth, and that not all magic users might be cut from the same cloth.” 

She remembers Merlin then. Dogged, stubborn, faithful Merlin, protecting Camelot, no matter what it took or what it cost him, even if it meant everyone hated him when they should have praised him instead. She would do anything to have him back; and yet she wants no one else to suffer as he must have. 

“My father-in-law had a magician to protect Camelot unbeknownst to him, and so too did my husband. It occurs to me that I’ve been remiss in the matter. Lady Ragnelle, might I interest you in the post?” 

* * *

So the Round Table forms again, around the queen’s seat rather than the king’s. They become quite famous, the queen and her ladies, and the adventures they go on. They fight evil and protect the downtrodden; they defeat monsters and break enchantments and listen to sorcerers. 

Others come, too, with time: sharp-tongued Lynet, who trains with them for a season before returning home to rescue her imperiled sister and bring her back to Camelot. Gentle Enid, whose brilliant legal mind wrangles back her parents’ usurped estate and wins her a position as one of Camelot’s foremost advisors. Clever Nyneve, who apprentices herself to Nell within days and amuses all of them by following the older woman around like a duckling. 

The table grows and grows, and one day, many years later, the Lily Maid of Astolat comes to Camelot on her enchanted boat, wearing a golden circlet on her brow. 

“I seek to restore the Cup of Life,” she says, and that is all. “Who in this company will join me?” 

Gwen is old by now, far too old for such a challenge; her limbs hang heavy at the end of the day, and her joints ache on cold nights. Her hair hangs silver when she uncoils it at night. Still, had she been only a few years younger, she might have said yes. 

At her side, she knows without having to look that Vivian, Mithian, and Sir Leon feel much the same. But Ragnelle’s lips quirk into a smile, and her son rises to his feet without a word; Lynet clasps her hands together with delight, and beside her, _Elena_ , of all people, rocks back and forth on the balls of her feet. 

Well, then. 

“Go,” says Queen Guinevere, getting regally to her feet as she sends out her champions to glory. “Go into the world, and bring your stories back home to me.”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] idylls of the queen; or, how the round table was reformed](https://archiveofourown.org/works/687396) by [Chestnut_filly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly)




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